It all started with a single tweet, written — and subsequently deleted — by [artist id=""]Fall Out Boy[/artist] drummer Andy Hurley. In it, he said the band was on "hiatus," touching off a wave of panic among FOB fans, most of whom were already skittish that their favorite band was calling it quits.

The problem was the word itself. "Hiatus" has a rather nasty and permanent connotation these days, it seems. So when MTV News caught up with Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz at the opening of American Eagle's Times Square store in New York, he took it upon himself to set the record straight ... again.

"It's weird because, if you look it up in the dictionary, 'hiatus' is a synonym for 'a break.' We're on a break that doesn't have a definite ending. There's no ending date," Wentz said. "We've been doing this for eight years straight, where it was pre-recording, record, promo, tour, tour, pre-recording, record, tour, tour, and our band was going to imminently implode."

So, while yes, Fall Out Boy are on a "hiatus," it's not of the nasty, this-is-forever variety (something Wentz tried to explain on his own Twitter account earlier this month). It's of the ... well, perhaps there's no good way to put it, which is why Wentz decided to coin a brand-new term for his band's break.

"I don't think I would use the word 'hiatus' because I think that word has gotten a dirty name, especially if you say 'indefinite hiatus,' " he explained. "I wouldn't use the word 'breakup' because that's not true. It's a break — we're decompressing. I'm making a new term for it: we're decompressing right now."